Team Meeting Notes from 5/14/09

Last week’s team meeting was again hosted from our Engineering office in Abbotsford, BC.  While I managed to get the minutes & video posted for our team before leaving for Seattle, I was not able to get these public notes done.  This weekend was spent with my family instead of in front of the keyboard… I apologize for keeping you waiting.

As a side note, for any of you other middle-aged, less than “active”, “I used to be able too…” types, I highly recommend thinking twice before trying to keep up with your middle-schooler’s at the local mountain biking park… let’s just say that my performance was not quite up to these… and, yes... this is the park we rode at *grin*.

On with the notes…

• Both Joe & I were in the office Thursday and Friday, getting some much needed connect time with the rest of the Engineering team.  Joe was coming in after also visiting the monthly Board meeting in San Mateo earlier in the week.
   
• For anyone who missed it, we also received notification of our designation as a runner up in the aspnetPRO Readers Choice Awards.  This was an awesome achievement and a testimony to our community for rallying support behind DotNetNuke.  Also, despite winning the popular vote (woo hoo!), we were also selected as a runner up for the IgniteIT Awards (sponsored my MS Canada).
   
• We let the team know that we would be sorting through speaker submissions for OpenForce ‘09 as well, and Friday we did… to the tune of 190 submissions and 67 speakers… to fill 16 available slots.  It was a really difficult process, as there were many interesting submissions and deserving speakers… we just could not select them all.  Thank you to everyone who submitted!
   
• We are now also hosting weekly introductory webinars to introduce folks to DotNetNuke.  These are primarily oriented toward new users to understand concepts and capabilities.  Many of you have clients that might benefit from introductory material.  Additional webinars will be added in the future, including a “Deep Dive” scheduled for June 3.
   
• We went over the new Beta Testing Program also.  Historically, beta testing has been done in a more “controlled” environment with the participation of the Community Team, Project Leads, Sponsors, etc.  But what we’ve found is that this just isn’t consistently reliable, primarily due to the unpredictability of peoples schedules.  So, even as we continue to beef up our own internal testing… we’re committing to full public beta testing of the platform and continued improvement of the tools, helps that we extend to the community to help out with that (such as the newly available upgrade testbeds).
   
• As part of that “culture change”… we also really encouraged the team to keep it’s own discussion of the 5.1 Beta in the public 5.1 Beta Forum.  It may seem a small thing, but as a team we’re pretty used to sorting things out in a private forum… so need to make an effort to move conversation on that topic here.
   
• Erik van Ballegoij submitted a new version of Announcements to the Project Release Tracker (which has now already been released).  This version fixes a nagging caching bug and provides full XHTML compliance… thanks Erik!  This version will be included in the next beta and production releases.
   
• I’d also just like to stop here and take a second to say THANK YOU to the team that does most of the work in our Project Release Tracker… that’s Sebastian Leupold, Mattias Schlomann, Timo Breumelhof & Cathal Connolly.  While some others participate, these guys by far do the lions share of the work and often with very little recognition for doing so… thanks, guys!
   
• Andrew Nurse is also submitting a new version of Reports to the Project Release Tracker to correct a small problem with use in 5.1.  It’s worth noting that although 5.1 DOES NOT introduce any breaking changes… it IS possible to have coded modules using certain calls, etc. that they should not have.  So for anyone out there with custom modules… I HIGHLY encourage you to download a 5.1 beta and give them a once over.  This will help you be ready for the new release, and will help us discover if changes are necessary.
   
• We also had a bit of discussion about our current Issue Tracking system.  We’ve been users of Countersoft’s Gemini product since it was first introduced; they have been generous with open source and we continue to be big fans.  The problem is that we are stuck on version 2.2 while they are preparing to release version 3.5.  There are a lot of reasons for this, maybe I’ll get a chance to blog about it later… but the bottom line is that our system is way behind and needs upgrading badly.  Alex will be happy to read that this is “officially” on my radar (as now posted in public view)… *grin*.  We’re arranging an internal presentation for this week to go over the features, possibilities in the latest version.
   
• There was some other ad-hoc discussion… but this is what we were primarily up to this week.  One thing we constantly face is too much to do and not enough folks!  And among the team (even ourselves) having “eyes that are bigger than our stomachs”.  Consider this a prelude to some new opportunities and increasing ways to solicit volunteer help from our community!

Until next week ;-)

Scott